By the age of eight, Reinaldo Arenas was in love with other men's penises, had discovered gang buggery and had slept with his cousin - a 12-year-old boy. By his mid-20s in 1968, he claimed to have slept with around 5,000 men, and much of the first part of his autobiography - dictated while dying of AIDS in the late 1980s - reads like a brag of sexual conquests chosen for their shock value. But it was all part of Arenas's uncompromising, elemental view of life that demanded living on your own terms, even if you lived under the Castro regime in Cuba. He evocatively describes a country that fell into a myth of being "revolutionised", waving its left wing instead of its right, but with a people who continued to suffer the same. Eventually he escaped to the US, only to discover "the difference is that although both give you a kick in the ass, in the communist system you have to applaud, while in the capitalist system you can scream. I came here to scream."